Half Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

meters down. Thirty-five. Thirty The glassy convexity loomed ahead, rising to meet his keels. He nosed up even more, very gently, killing descent briefly while airspeed continued to drop. The bulge kept rising toward him. Without orders, Inger began calling airspeed aloud. The wings should maintain lift down to sixteen meters per second at his present weight, Belvew knew, and the stall then should be smooth. Some levels of theory were solidly established.
    “Twenty-two zero—twenty-one nine—twenty-one eight—”
    The keels were two meters from the bulge, and he nosed up still farther to keep them so as the airspeed continued to fall. That wouldn’t work much farther; past the top of the dome he’d have to drop the nose to make contact before stall, and that would speed him up unless he eased back on thrust with a precision which only practice could have given. Not very much speedup could be produced by Titan’s gravity, but any at all would complicate the landing.
    The side edges of his screen darkened suddenly, but he kept his attention ahead. If there was anything important aft, someone would tell him this time, though he hoped they wouldn’t before he was stopped.
    For an instant he wished he were actually riding the jet, so that he could feel when touchdown occurred.
    But he knew anyway. The accelerometer and three human voices told him simultaneously. He stopped mass flow and quenched the plasma fires almost completely, but kept ready to use fractional rocket power on one side or the other if a swerve developed. A severe yaw too close to touchdown speed could roll the Oceanus onto her back even with the keels three meters apart, and it seemed most unlikely that whichever wing was underneath could take such treatment.
    “You’re down!” came Ginger’s rather snappish voice, this time separate from the others’. Belvew snorted faintly, and spared enough of his attention to utter a bit of doggerel which had survived in various forms from the time of fabric-covered aircraft.
    “A basic rule of flying, and one you’ll always need: An aircraft’s never landed until it’s lost its speed.”
    But deceleration was now rapid as the keel friction made itself felt, and a few seconds later the landing was complete. Belvew knew he wouldn’t feel it, but his stomach tightened up anyway for several more seconds as he watched screen and vertical-motion meters for evidence that the ship was breaking through a surface.
    Apparently it wasn’t, and at last he felt free to let his attention focus on the view aft.
    The screen darkening was from a slowly spreading cloud of black smoke, its nearest edge well over two hundred meters astern. It could not, the pilot judged at once, have been produced by friction between his keels and the surface; his landing slide hadn’t started that far back, and skin thermometers showed that the keels were at about a hundred and fifty kelvins. This was considerably but not worrisomely above ambient. They were cooling rapidly, but not so quickly as to suggest they had been hot enough in the last few seconds to boil Titanian tar.
    Not that anyone really knew what temperature that would take, Gene reflected fleetingly.
    More to the point, a fairly deep trough in the surface, starting just below the near side of the smoke cloud and extending as far back along his approach path as he could see, confirmed that whatever had happened to the surface had come before touchdown. The most obvious cause was hot exhaust. He was too busy at the moment to devise the GO6-demanded alternative hypothesis, so he refrained from uttering this one aloud.
    The smoke was being borne very slowly away from him by the negligible wind. The trough, half a meter deep and ten or twelve wide, remained uniform as the receding cloud revealed more and more of it, extending down the slope of the convexity. The jet had come to rest almost exactly at the top of the bulge, it seemed; both pitch and roll indicators read within a